William Blake, his life and works, Prepared by Ahmad Hussain, Department of English,Abdul Wali khan University Mardan. Email: mr.literature123@gmail.com Facebook page link for Literary students: www.facebook.com/englitpearls

1. BY AHMAD HUSSAIN
Department of English,
ABDUL WALI KHAN UNIVERSITY MARDAN

2. William Blake(1757-1827)
 The most independent and original of all the romantic poets.
 He had love for children and nature.
 To Blake nature was a vast source of spiritual symbolism.
 Blake was a mystic poet.
 To Blake Imaginations and sensations of the heart were the sole guides to truth.
 As a child he had visions of God and angels looking in at his window.
 He was a Pantheist( the one who searches God in nature).
 As a man he thought he received visits from the souls of the great dead like
(Moses,Virgil,Homer,Dante and Milton.)

3. Life of Blake:
 Blake was born in London; was a son of tradesman.
 Blake had no formal education.
 Blake was a strange imaginative child who spent his life with brooks and flowers and fairies
than with the crowd of the city streets.
 At ten years he began to copy prints and to write verses.
 In early years he seems to have acquaintance of the works of Shakespeare and John Milton.
 Blake had already read the Bible when he was a little child.
 At the age of 14, he was apprenticed to an engraver.
 He was better known as an illustrator than as a writer throughout his life.
 Critics generally dismiss Blake with the word “Madman”.

4. Works of Blake:
 First publication was The Poetical Sketches in 1783, a series of imaginative poems, in which
he followed the manner of Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton.
 Much of it was written in Boyhood.
 These were followed by two another great and famous works of Blake known as “Song of
Innocence(1789) and Song of Experience(1794)”, reflecting two widely different views of
human soul.
 These works contain some of the most orient gems of English lyricism.
 A critic observes: “His passion for freedom was, akin to that which moved Wordsworth,
Coleridge and Southey in their early years”.
 Swineburne calls Blake the only poet of “supreme” and simple poetic genius of the eighteen
century.

5.  The book of Thel(1790) , which embodies much the same spirit of love as his
earlier works, was followed by the first series of revolutionary prophetic books
The French Revolution(1791) and America(1793).
 In these two political and revolutionary works, the contemporary political
conflicts are seen as one step towards, not only political freedom, but freedom
from the restrictions of convention and established morality.
 In his another poem The visions of the Daughters of Albion(1793), there is a
vigorous defense of the satisfaction of physical appetite, and an exposure of the
wrongs to which woman is subject.

6. o In Song of Experience, there is less joyful note, spontaneous love and happiness revealed as in
his early work Song of Innocence.
o These lyric poems have an intensity which are not to be found in Songs of Innocence.
o In these poems, we see Blake presenting the two conflicting aspects of a nature which is so
beautiful yet cruel.
o Other minor works of Blake are: The first book of Urizen(1794), The song of Los(1795),
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Gates of Paradise, the Tiger and the Lamb.

7.  Jerusalem and Milton was one of the latest works of William Blake.
 The conflict between imagination and reason is now thought to be resolved by
the coming of Christ.
 Blake spent the years 1800-3 at Eelpham in Sussex with his friend William
Hayley.
 And It was the stage of spiritual development in Blake’s life.

8.  Prepared by Ahmad Hussain, Department of
English, Abdul Wali khan University
Mardan.
 Email: mr.literature123@gmail.com
 Facebook page link for Literary students:
www.facebook.com/englitpearls